Animal Farm by George Orwell

Animal Farm by George Orwell is the classic allegory of the false hopes of Soviet Communism. The sympathetic story of the animals who hope for a ideal farm, run by animals and for animals, turns into a nightmare of oppression by the pigs who become their new masters. It was a prescient and insightful book which deserves to be cherished by freedom loving people.

The book shows the evil of propaganda, revisionist history and twisted laws. We feel for the hardworking, long-suffering Boxer who gives his life for the farm, and are repulsed by the selfish, heartless pigs who are ready to take advantage of him.

However, there are some glaring shortcomings of the book.

The Animal Farm run by the pigs is no better than the previous Manor Farm run by the human, Mr. Jones. But in the final chapter Orwell has the farm being still successful by those same human standards. Being written in 1945, Orwell does not anticipate the failure and internal collapse of Soviet Communism 40 years later. The farm actually becomes a model of productivity and efficiency to the human-led farms around them, albeit at the expense of the lower animals. The last paragraph, where Napoleon is caught cheating at cards, may be a hint of that future collapse, but it is only a hint.

Orwell also offers no counter philosophy that proves why the pigs are wrong. They are inherently smarter and more capable than the other animals. The reader feels a moral revulsion that they would use their abilities to take advantage of those less intelligent than them, but Orwell has nothing equivalent to the theologically-based statement in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. The raven is the sole religious figure who talks of the glorious Sugarcandy Mountain, but he is a crackpot and simpleton who offers no real help to the suffering animals and gathers no following.

Finally, Orwell does not show any of the lesser animals actually standing up to their oppressors. There is no hope for another revolution to reject their new pig overlords. The reader comes away convinced that the first revolution was a failure, but does not see any way out of the current situation.

Out of an Abundance of Caution

In March 2020, COVID-19 panic hit the US with surprising speed. In weeks prior measures were already being taken, but then President Trump declared a national emergency followed quickly by Governor Newsom declaring daily-escalating shelter-in-place orders in California. We all stayed home, waiting for the viral wave to break over us. The rationale was that temporary drastic measures were necessary to keep our hospitals from being overwhelmed like they had recently been in Italy.

At that time, the virus was an unknown danger. Six months later, it's safe to say we know quite a bit more about it, and what it has exposed in our culture.

A month after the lockdowns began, major news outlets reported on antibody studies performed by respected institutions like USC, Stanford, Northeastern University and others. They independently found that the virus had spread through the population 10, 20 or even 50 times greater than the "confirmed cases" on the John Hopkins dashboard website. When I heard this, I told my children that the panic would be over in a week because the virus was confirmed to be not nearly as deadly as initially feared. Instead of a 5% or even 2% mortality rate, it was 10, 20 or 50 times less. Worse than the flu, but not a deadly pestilence that demanded shutting down the economy.

I still remember the dejected feeling several days later reading follow-on news reports that interpreted those same results, not by concluding that the virus was not as deadly as we feared, but that the contagion was far worse than we knew.

In the initial weeks we were given conflicting advice regarding masks. The US Surgeon General tweeted that we should not buy masks because they are ineffective and because medical professionals needed them. The obviously duplicity can be forgiven because everyone was scrambling then, but months later the mask/no-mask debate has been fully integrated into our progressive/conservative culture war.

So, as a conservative, here are a few lessons I've learned.

The seeds of COVID-19 fear were planted well before the virus came. For years, we've been helicopter parenting our children because of the low-percentage chance that a child molester may be stalking our city playground. We've sanitized commercial kitchens from the residual presence of peanuts because a small number of our people may have a deadly reaction. And we started offering gluten-free communion options to our congregants because - well, I still don't know the rationale for this one. I'm realizing that our ability to assess risk and responsibility has not kept pace with the explosion of news and opinion offered by the Internet. 

Our new moral reasoning that brought ethically-sourced seafood, fair-trade coffee, and reusable shopping bags is now been applied to a contagious disease. People are driving in their cars by themselves with masks on and no one is telling them that there's no point. Others are wearing gloves while pumping gas and no one is re-iterating the CDC's updated advice that the virus is unlikely to be transmitted on surfaces. Instead of reasonable measures which respect individual freedom and common sense, we have fear-mongering and moralizing in the name of science, regardless of actual effectiveness. I'm realizing that while science is a powerful tool which can bring wonderful benefits, it can be easily co-opted for political purposes when used as a moral cudgel.

Finally, the massive outlay of cash by the Federal Government has completely pummeled what remained of fiscal conservatism. We have no idea what the future cost will be as our national debt climbs ever higher, but we convince ourselves that there will be no cost or that the uber-rich will pay. The government showered unemployment benefits on low wage workers, and weeks later our streets explode with Marxist fervor. If the Progressives succeed in tearing down the free-market system that has been built over the past several centuries, the ruin and misery felt by all people, rich and poor, regardless of skin color or political affiliation, will be immense. I'm realizing how precious and fragile our system of liberal democratic capitalism is.

We continue to respond to the coronavirus out of an abundance of caution, thinking that the risks are obvious, the science is clear, and the costs are worth it. But it seems we all have a lot more learning to do.